


The Glass Hearts

by magpie_fngrl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fairy Tale Style, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 02:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14684733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magpie_fngrl/pseuds/magpie_fngrl
Summary: This is a tale about three sisters who were born with glass hearts.





	The Glass Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> A mille merci to **[PalenDrome (nerdherderette)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdherderette/pseuds/PalenDrome)  
> **  
>  for her fast and thorough beta and her encouragement! ❤❤  
> All remaining mistakes are mine.

**Once, a fear pierced him,**

**In that he mistook**

**The shadow of his equipage**

**For blackbirds.**

**_Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Wallace Stevens_ **

 

* * *

 

This is a tale about three sisters who were born with glass hearts.

Bella has dark hair and she’s the smart one.

Cissy has fair hair and she’s the beautiful one.

Dro has brown hair and she’s the middle one.

 

It is winter, and Dro has never ventured so far into the whispering woods before. Bella leads the way, singing and waving a twig around like a wand. Their footsteps crunch on fallen snow. Bare boughs sway over their heads, impossibly high. Dro feels tiny, but she’s not afraid. She admires her older sister and follows her everywhere. Dro’s five; Bella is seven and she’s ferocious and fearless, and if she sometimes likes to terrify Dro with made-up spells then it’s all right, because she laughs and tells Dro it’d been a joke. Dro wipes her tears and laughs with her sister, and the next day Bella does it again.

‘Close your eyes and count to ten,’ Bella says. ‘Then you have to find me. It’s a game.’

Dro does as her sister says. She closes her eyes and counts to ten. When she opens her eyes, Bella isn’t there—it’s just Dro and the woods, trees with long-reaching branches and black birds looking at her. Dro ignores the twinge of fear and plasters on a smile. She peeks behind tree trunks, but Bella is nowhere to be seen. Dro lifts her head but sees only the grey sky through the empty branches. The way home isn’t clear, and Dro can’t see her sister’s footsteps in the snow. Darkness falls, the cold creeps in, and Dro begins to feel true fear. Tears run down her cheeks; she wipes her nose and calls her sister’s name. The birds take flight. Dro is alone and afraid, and the woods are dark.

Gerin, the house-elf, finds her later, shivery and weepy. Dro seeks comfort in her parents’ embrace, who call Bella in the candlelit parlour. Their stern admonition turns into admiration when Bella confesses that she managed to magically erase her footprints when she concentrated hard enough. Dro’s tears are forgotten in light of this precocious display of underage magic. Bella looks at Dro as she receives the praise, and it’s the first time Dro notices the cruel edges of her sister’s smile.

In the spring, Dro climbs trees. She likes to get to know the trees that had scared her so. She feels that if she becomes friends with them, she’ll never fear them again. She also likes to hide from Bella’s attentions. Dro has learned by now that Bella likes to make things bleed.

One day Bella finds Dro and climbs after her, but she’s not experienced with trees the way Dro is. She’s not _friends_ with them. One wrong step and she falls on the ground with a thud that raises a cloud of dust.

Bella doesn’t cry, not even when her bones regrow. She’s broken her arm, her ankle and her glass heart. And while the skele-gro mends her arm and her ankle, it does nothing for her heart. It’s broken into too many shards to ever heal.

 

Cissy is four. She has hair like molten gold and eyes like the summer sky, and she gets everything she asks for. She loves to play in the gardens, but after Bella’s accident, Mother doesn’t let Cissy out of her sight. Dro’s younger sister grows delicate and soft-mannered. She doesn’t share Bella’s outright cruelty; she pets the crups their family owns and cries when Bella maims them. Cissy doesn’t climb trees like Dro or splash in the ponds or ride ponies; Mother won’t let her. Mother wants Cissy to draw quietly by the fire and eat sugar cakes and keep her heart safe.

‘Bella survived it because she’s strong,’ Father says. ‘You two aren’t as strong as Bella; you need to be more careful with your glass hearts.’

But Dro doesn’t want to be careful. She doesn’t want her glass heart to become a glass cage like the one Cissy’s in, and she doesn’t want her heart to become tiny knives, like the invisible ones Bella wields. She likes to ride horses and jump into rain puddles and fly on adult brooms. When she’s nine, she turns up muddy to the Midsummer Ball. Her mother punishes her by making her tidy her own room. She probably thinks such demeaning tasks will cure Dro of her impetuousness, that it’ll shock her into learning some manners, but Dro takes to the cleaning spells like she was born for them.

Mother’s despair and derision hurts. It grows as the years pass, and sometimes it hurts Dro so much she thinks her heart will break but it doesn’t. Her heart’s learnt to be tough after years of growing up with Bella. Dro becomes an expert in cleaning charms just to piss off her mother some more. She keeps riding horses and flying over the treetops and swimming in cold, clear lakes.

‘Think of your glass heart,’ her mother insists, but Dro doesn’t care if her heart breaks as long as she has the wind in her hair and the rain on her face.

 

In school, Bella is a leader. The tiny knives of her heart—unseen by most, but Dro’s familiar with their sharp edges—make people bleed. They make people fear Bella. They make people admire her. Some people like watching others get hurt while some are afraid they’ll be next; both kinds trail after Bella like pups desperate for scraps. By the time Dro goes to Hogwarts, Bella has many friends and even more enemies.

A boy in their House falls for Bella. Rodolphus is tall and dark-skinned, rich as Croesus, sly as a bear trap, and for once, Bella hides her knives and kisses him.

In school, Cissy is adored. She’s beautiful and unapproachable and many hearts break over her, but Cissy’s heart has grown cold. Soft declarations of love by soft school children can’t pierce it. Praise slides off her like rain off a window. What need does Cissy have of adoration when she grew up swimming in it?

In her fourth year, Cissy catches the eye of a boy in Dro’s year: a Prefect, fair-haired and clever. Lucius wears his hair long and likes to talk about himself. Cissy apparently likes to listen to him talk about himself and kisses him.

In school, Dro is mostly ignored. She has no friends bar one: Magdalene. Magdalene has loose curls, a wide mouth and Muggle parents. Year after year, they share a dorm, secrets whispered at night, and an interest in Quidditch. They spend hours by the lake, their bare toes squelching in the mud, skipping pebbles and throwing bread to the Great Squid. Magic fills Magdalene with wonder even now, five years into Hogwarts. Dro likes her Muggle stories; they fill her with wonder, too. One evening she kisses Magdalene, and Magdalene kisses her back.

Magdalene promises to look after Dro’s heart. ‘It’ll be safe with me,’ she says, and Dro believes her.

Just before school breaks for the summer, Cissy catches them kissing and tells Bella. Bella wastes no time in teaching the ‘Mudblood’ a lesson and corners Magdalene in the girls’ toilets on the sixth floor. Witnesses insist that Magdalene attacked first, that Bella only defended herself. When Magdalene comes out of the infirmary, she doesn’t speak to Dro again. Dro looks too much like Bella, Magdalene says. Dro is the sister of the girl who cut stripes off Magdalene’s skin. Maybe one day her glass heart will break too, and she’ll be like her sister, Magdalene says.

Dro’s heart doesn’t break, but it cracks. Blood seeps in and it makes Dro’s chest heavy. She worries for the first time that she might die, that her heart can’t take this much agony. That the crack will widen, the blood will flood her heart, and what then?

Life doesn’t let her grieve in peace; Dro is sixteen, and that means she will come out to society that summer. She swallows back the tears and schools her face into a mask, standing still while the seamstress spells the hem of her white robes to just the right height and Cissy and Bella choose white satin shoes for her feet and pearls for her neck.

It’s a distraction, if nothing else. Dro makes her debut by the side of Morton Mulciber and dances with him. She lets him kiss her on the lips and leave a mark on her neck. She lets him make up stories about how she ‘gave it up.’

Bella and Cissy spend most of the evening on the dancefloor. Dro spends most of it at the table, folding the napkins into shapes. She suffers her aunt Walburga’s inquisitive eyes and cutting tongue, and her uncle Orion’s intrusive gaze. Her little cousins look handsome and unhappy. Sirius asks Dro if it hurts to have a glass heart, and Dro says yes.

 

In her final two years of school, people leave Dro alone. She’s known as Bella’s sister—and no one wants to mess with Bella’s sister, even though she’s already left school.

Dro doesn’t want to be Bella’s sister; all she wants is to be herself, but she doesn’t know how to do that. She’s been ‘Bella’s sister’ her entire life.

Solitude suits Dro and she wears it well. She studies and flies and strolls around the lake. Often she lies on her bed and feels her chest up to see if the crack in her heart has widened. A heart filled with blood hurts all the time, Dro discovers. It hurts to learn that Magdalene transferred to Beauxbatons. It aches to see a First Year crying in an alcove because his friends shunned him and he misses home. It stings when the boy she’s developed a crush on kisses another girl.

Cissy reacts with fear when Dro confides in her. ‘Tell Mother,’ she advises. ‘Stop playing Quidditch. Stop doing things that might cause further harm.’

‘It’s strange,’ Dro tells her. ‘I feel as if it’s getting stronger, in a way.’

She describes to Cissy the times her heart hurts the most, but Cissy doesn’t comprehend. Her heart has turned solid like a block of ice and just as impenetrable.

 

Dro leaves school and her home; she finds a job in Oxford at a local newspaper, helping with the printing and the typesetting. Bella’s shadow grows thin, then disappears, and Dro allows herself to ease into this new life. She buys flowers for the window sills of her tiny flat and cooks interesting recipes, usually with disastrous results. She walks by the river and sings in the shower, and when people flirt with her, she flirts back.

One of the journalists likes to stop by her desk and chat. His name is Ted, and he has blond hair and a smile like hot chocolate, warm and irresistible. Dro goes out with him to pubs and restaurants, and they talk and laugh and kiss under a red awning. Soon, she wakes up beside him on most days; at night, he whispers dark, pretty things against her neck and touches and licks her in all the right places.

Her blood-filled heart hurts in many different ways now. It throbs and pulses and pangs; it stings and burns; it swells and overflows, like boiling milk off a pot. Although her new heart hurts like hell, Dro wouldn’t change it back. It holds love and compassion, and regret and fear, and longing and lust—a potent mix. Even if her glass heart breaks now, Dro has a new one, and it feels much sturdier.

 

Bella marries first. She and Rodolphus are a match made in heaven, everyone says. Dro agrees; Rodolphus is her sister’s mirror. He reflects her sister’s viciousness and amplifies it.

Cissy marries second. She and Lucius are a match made in heaven, everyone says. Dro agrees; Lucius is her sister’s mirror. He reflects her sister’s vanity and amplifies it.

Dro marries last. A disgrace, everyone says. Her father offers money to Ted to abandon Dro; her mother pleads with her to come to her senses. Cissy suspects a  love potion; Bella sneers, ‘Am I the only one who _isn’t_ surprised?’

When the news of her disownment arrives in an official-looking letter with cursive handwriting, Dro is surprised by her lack of emotion. She’s always wanted to be herself and now she is; the letter is a paper sword, cutting her ties to the past, once and for all. Dro burns it. She and Ted buy a house by the river Avon and soon they have a daughter, who is as miraculous as a daughter should be.

 

As the years go by, Dro watches her daughter grow and climb trees and fly brooms and run until she’s breathless. She hasn’t spoken to either of her sisters since her wedding, but Cissy sends her a letter in secret a few years later. She doesn’t expect a response, and Dro doesn’t give one. Cissy announces the birth of her son after years of trying and two miscarriages, and closes with worry: ‘At the sight of his little face, my heart cracked and I can sense it filling with blood. I haven’t told Lucius. It hurts, Dro. It hurts to love someone so much.’

When Dro’s daughter gets ready to go fight in a battle, Dro watches her leave and agrees with her sister. It hurts to love someone so much. But her pulsing, red heart can take it. 

**Author's Note:**

> The title was inspired by [a Russian fairytale.](http://www.elfinspell.com/FolkloreCollections/GoldenFairyBook/ThreeSisters.html)  
> ***  
> Come say hello at [tumblr](http://magpiefngrl.tumblr.com/)!  
> 


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